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Susan Carson
Creative Industries, QUT
'A Girl's Guide to Modernism's Grammar: Language Politics in Australian Experimental Women's Fiction'
In 1917, the New York Evening Sun wrote that 'some people think that women are the cause of modernism, whatever that is.' The links between women and modernism, this paper argues, continue to be problematic, particularly in the Australian context. This paper addresses the language of Modernism as a way of answering the question implied in 1917, 'whatever that is,' noting the continuing ambiguity surrounding the terminology of Modernism. This ambiguity has been emphasized in recent work by feminist theorists who have sought to liberate women's writing from the confines of grammar and metalanguage that have shackled discussions of experimental writing, and of modernism in particular. 'Modernism,' it seems, can still be a dirty word in feminist textual practice.
This paper is interested, chiefly, in the expressions of modernist writing practices in Australian women's writing in the inter-war period, arguing that a re-consideration of the terms and grammar of Modernism can recoup and extend the critical discourse associated with the work of this period. The discussion is indebted to recent critiques by Susan Stanford Friedman and Terry Threadgold, who have argued, in different ways, for further discussion of the terms surrounding Modernism as a means of expanding critical discourse. Friedman attempts to confront the 'contradictory status of meanings' in modernist discourse whereas Threadgold considers the potential of a metalanguage based on grammar as a way of producing new meanings. Both theorists argue for a reconsideration of the grammar of Modernism – in order to expand the body both of existing work available for feminist criticism, and also to make a statement about the ways in which critical discourses confine understandings of women's fiction.
The paper considers aspects of Friedman and Stanford's work in the context of inter-war Australian women's writing, specifically the fiction of Christina Stead and Eleanor Dark. Whereas it is generally understood that certain responses to international politics, publishers' marketing policies and a national literary agenda combined to displace interest in modernist writing practices, this paper is interested, as well, in the continuation of that displacement in critical contexts.
Bio: Dr Susan Carson lectures in the Creative Writing and Cultural Studies discipline in the faculty of Creative Industries at the Queensland University of Technology in Brisbane. Prior to recent academic appointments, Dr Carson worked as a journalist in Sydney and Brisbane, specialising in issues relating to information technology. Dr Carson left the media to undertake postgraduate work at the University of Queensland, completing a PhD that focussed on Australian women's writing and Australian expressions of modernism by way of a study of the work of Eleanor Dark. This research initiated an ongoing interest in expressions of Modernism. Dr Carson has been a full time lecturer at QUT for two years, and is currently working on a joint research project on the teaching of Shakespeare. Her major teaching areas are literary theory and cultural studies, Shakespeare, and Nineteenth Century Literature.
<sj.carson@qut.edu.au>